The Boy Who Came Home: How DNA Undid the Bobby Dunbar Case
On the morning of August 23, 1912, Percy and Lessie Dunbar of Opelousas, Louisiana, drove out to Swayze Lake for a fishing trip with friends. The lake was a shallow cypress swamp in St. Landry Parish, black water and alligators, about twenty miles from town. With them were their two small sons. The older one, Robert Clarence Dunbar, called Bobby, was four years old, born on May 23, 1908. The Dunbars were a comfortable, well connected family in a town where their name carried weight.
Sometime during the outing Bobby walked away from the adults and did not come back. The alarm went up within minutes. Men waded into the swamp, dragged the shallows and searched the tree line until dark. Nothing was found: no body, no clothing, no clear trail. The two obvious explanations were both terrible. Either the child had drowned in water that could hide him completely, or someone had carried him off along the railroad line that ran near the lake. The Dunbars refused to accept the first, and the search widened.
What followed was one of the largest manhunts the South had seen. Percy Dunbar posted a reward of one thousand dollars and later raised it to six thousand, an enormous sum in 1912. Handbills with Bobby's description went out across the country, newspapers in New Orleans, Chicago and New York carried the story, and reported sightings arrived from a dozen states. Every tramp and traveling worker with a small boy became a suspect. For eight months the leads went nowhere.
On April 13, 1913, the case broke. Authorities near Columbia, Mississippi, stopped a traveling handyman named William Cantwell Walters, who moved through the countryside tuning and repairing pianos and organs. With him was a small boy who matched the description on the handbills. Walters was detained, and word went to Opelousas that Bobby Dunbar had been found.
Walters had an explanation, and he never changed it. The boy, he said, was Charles Bruce Anderson, called Bruce, the son of a young woman named Julia Anderson who had worked for the Walters family in North Carolina. Bruce's father, according to Walters, was his own brother. Julia Anderson, unmarried and poor, had allowed Walters to take the boy along on his travels. He insisted he had been traveling openly with Bruce for months, and that people in Mississippi had seen the two of them together long before the Dunbar boy vanished.
The identification in Mississippi did not go smoothly. Newspaper accounts of the meeting between Lessie Dunbar and the child contradicted one another. Some reported an immediate and emotional recognition. Others reported that the boy showed no sign of knowing her, and that Lessie herself was uncertain. The following day she bathed the child, examined the marks on his body and declared that she recognized moles and scars. From that moment the Dunbars treated the question as closed.
Opelousas agreed. The boy was brought home to a parade, a brass band and crowds in the street. Photographs of the reunited family ran nationwide. The story had the shape everyone wanted: a stolen child restored, a wandering stranger to blame. Public feeling hardened around it long before any court examined the evidence.
Then Julia Anderson came. A newspaper paid her way from North Carolina so that she could see the child. The meeting was arranged as a test. The boy was placed among five children of similar age and she was asked to pick out her son. She hesitated, and the boy gave her no sign of recognition. The next day she was allowed to examine him alone and undressed, and she identified marks on his body. From then on she said without wavering that the child was Bruce, her son.
It made no difference. The same newspapers that had funded her trip now dissected her private life, reporting that she had borne three children outside marriage, and treating her hesitation at the lineup as proof of fraud. She had no money, no lawyer of her own and no standing in Louisiana. The child stayed with the Dunbars. Julia Anderson went back to North Carolina with nothing, and returned to the state only to testify.
William Walters was extradited to Louisiana and tried for kidnapping in Opelousas in 1914. Witnesses from Poplarville, Mississippi, where Walters and the boy had spent considerable time, testified that they had seen the two of them together before August 1912, which would have made the kidnapping impossible. Julia Anderson testified for the defense. The court accepted the Dunbar identification, found that the child was Bobby Dunbar, convicted Walters and sentenced him to life in prison.
The conviction did not hold. The Louisiana Supreme Court overturned it and ordered a new trial. Prosecutors, citing the cost of the first one, decided not to try him again, and Walters walked out after roughly two years behind bars. He went back to the road and to his trade, and for the rest of his life he told anyone who asked that he had never stolen a child. He died on April 7, 1945, in Pueblo, Colorado.
The boy grew up in Opelousas as Bobby Dunbar. He married, had four children, ran a gas station and by every account lived an ordinary life. In 1954, when his son Bobby Dunbar Jr. asked him directly whether he was certain of who he was, he answered that he knew who he was and knew who his son was, and that nothing else made a difference. He died on March 8, 1966, and was buried in Bellevue Memorial Park in Opelousas. Julia Anderson had died long before him, on February 1, 1940. She had settled in Poplarville, married, raised seven more children, worked as a nurse and midwife and helped found a church. Her family said she spoke of the son she lost for the rest of her life.
In 1999, thirty three years after his death, his granddaughter Margaret Dunbar Cutright began going through the case. She read the trial record, the newspaper files and the family papers, and she interviewed Julia Anderson's surviving children. She had expected to confirm the family story. Instead the documents pulled the other way. In 2004, prompted by an inquiry from an Associated Press reporter, her father Bob Dunbar Jr. agreed to a DNA test. His sample was compared with that of a first cousin, the son of Bobby Dunbar's younger brother Alonzo. The two men were not related. The child brought home to Opelousas in 1913 had not been Bobby Dunbar. In 2008 the story was told on the public radio program This American Life, and in 2012 Cutright and the writer Tal McThenia published a book about the case.
Conclusions and Open Questions
The DNA result closed one question and reopened another. It established that the boy raised as Bobby Dunbar was not a Dunbar, which means the courts of 1913 and 1914 got the central fact wrong, that William Walters was convicted of a kidnapping the evidence does not support, and that Julia Anderson lost a child she had correctly identified. It says nothing about what happened to the real Bobby Dunbar. On that point the record is still empty.
The theory with the most support behind it is the simplest. Margaret Dunbar Cutright, who worked the case harder than anyone, concluded that Bobby most likely drowned at Swayze Lake and that his body was never recovered, possibly taken by an alligator. The weakness is that the swamp was searched hard and fast by men who knew it, and nothing at all was found: no body, no shoe, no scrap of clothing.
The alternative is that someone took him. A rail line ran near the lake, and the family always believed a stranger carried him away. The weakness here is that in more than a century no credible trace of such a person has surfaced. There was no ransom demand, no confession, no later identification, and the one man ever prosecuted turned out to have been traveling with a different child.
The hardest open question is what Percy and Lessie Dunbar actually believed. One reading, favored by many who have studied the file, is honest error: a mother eight months into her grief, shown a boy of the right age in a room where everyone had already decided, persuading herself through moles and scars. The competing reading, held by Julia Anderson's descendants, is that the family came to understand the truth and could not turn back once the parade had been held. Neither can be proved. No document records a private admission by either parent.
What is not in doubt is that Julia Anderson was wronged. She was poor, unmarried and from another state. She was given a lineup test on demand, and when she hesitated the press turned her private life into evidence against her. She had no lawyer of her own. She was right about her son and she lost him anyway, and she died in 1940 without knowing that she would ever be believed.
The remaining questions are short and stubborn. What happened in the hours after a four year old walked away from the adults at Swayze Lake. Whether Bruce Anderson, living out his life in Opelousas, ever privately suspected the truth, and what he meant in 1963 when he passed through Poplarville and remarked that those were the people he had been picked up from. And whether anything is still there to find. Until something is, the case has two names restored and one child who is still missing.